The Sexopaths (15 page)

‘It’s okay – she’s
discreet.  And she doesn’t normally work this side of town.’

‘Where do you live?’ asks
Monique.  ‘If you don’t mind my asking.’

‘Sunny Leith.  I’m staying
at my mum’s for a few weeks just now… while I’m getting my finances sorted
out.  So I can rent my own place again.’

‘That shouldn’t take too long?’

‘You’re not tax people, are you?’

She says it only half-seriously,
but Monique reacts quickly.

‘Of course not!’  She clasps
her hands reassuringly over Jasmin’s.  ‘I can show you our pictures on our
company websites.’

‘It’s okay – I mean… I know
you’re genuine.’

‘Do you see many couples?’

‘There’s been one or two around
town.’

Their glasses are low and Adam
tenders refills.  The warming champagne is lively and bubbles overflow
onto Jasmin’s fingers.  She reaches towards him, presenting her glistening
knuckles.

‘Suck?’

He hesitates, suddenly
self-conscious about performing the slavish act in front of Monique. 
Jasmin transfers the offer to Monique, who is quick to oblige.

‘If that’s what you like doing
with champagne, we’ve plenty on ice.’  Adam tries to recover lost ground,
but he knows he failed her little test.

Jasmin holds up her glass. 
‘See? – I don’t normally drink on a job.  I must feel good. 
You have such a beautiful place.  I’d love somewhere like this.’

‘How do you manage, living with
your mother?’

Jasmin understands the nature of
Monique’s query.  She replies:

‘I
can
do incalls. 
When I know the place is going to be empty.  My mum works part-time for
the Co-op.’

Adam pictures a shabby flat
draped with damp laundry, daylight intruding around the edges of ill-fitting
curtains, lingering cooking smells.

Monique asks: ‘Does your mother
know what you do?’

‘Nobody knows.  Well, Liz
– my taxi driver – but she would never tell anyone.  Girls on
the website, obviously we’re acquainted.’

‘Are you okay about being here
tonight?’

‘Sure – I’ve not been
trafficked, you know.’  She says it with a smile.  ‘This feels good.’

‘How did you begin?’

Adam doesn’t doubt this is the
question Monique has been itching to ask.

‘My boyfriend and I booked a call
girl one night.’

‘Really?’

‘No – silly!’  Jasmin
laughs and nearly topples over, pressing down upon Monique’s thigh with her
free hand.  She slides it momentarily higher before she recovers her
pose.  ‘I was a dancer – you know, lap dancing.  Girls I knew
were talking about it.  I was twenty-one.  I went along and got the
job.  It was as simple as that.  There was good money back then,
before clubs sprang up everywhere.  You could make a grand a night. 
You had to pay two hundred in commission.’

‘And did you… have sex with customers?’

‘Not inside the club you
didn’t.  Punters would ask you to leave with them.  It was
seven-fifty for an overnight.  I’d done it about five times.  It was
cool.  Just like going with someone you’ve met in a bar – only no
complications and well paid.  Then this oil guy – the last one
– he offered me five grand a month just to keep me for himself.  So
I left the club.  He’d phone me when he was going to fly in – maybe
every fortnight, for the weekend.  I didn’t have to buy anything, furs,
designer watches, Chanel.  It wasn’t really like being on the game –
and he was okay.  But I was twenty-one and he was nearly sixty.  That
was for about two years.  But it had to end – you know?’

‘He probably wanted you to fall
in love with him.’  Adam finds both girls looking at him.  Monique
seems intrigued by his flash of intuition.

‘That’s exactly right.’ 
Jasmin nods slowly.

Adam again tops up the
glasses.  He’s pretty drunk now and guesses both of the girls must be
feeling likewise.  Re-admitted to the conversation, he says:

‘So you branched out on your
own?’

‘Yeah.  I did really
well.  I owned three flats at one time.  Then about two years ago I
just cleared out to live in Spain.  I went
loco
–
crazy.  I blew about a hundred-and-fifty grand in a year.  Lost
thirty on a car I wrote off.  Parties.  Clothes.  Booze. 
Some bad stuff.’

‘When did you come home?’ asks
Monique.

‘About… a few months ago.’

Adam, already doubting her
account, is almost certain she’s been on the Angels365 website for longer than
‘a few months’.  Though she makes no bones about her fallen status, he
wonders how much of this fantastic tale is really hers.

‘And how long have you been doing
it, altogether?’

‘About ten years, on and
off.  I go through phases when I don’t feel like it.’

Adam guesses that, like him,
Monique will be computing her probable age – at least thirty-one if it’s
true she was initiated at twenty-one.  It would fit – her powdered
façade has the look of a stony mask, the freshness of youth weathered by hard
times.

‘What about boyfriends?’

Monique is covering all angles,
but Jasmin seems happy enough to oblige.  Adam inwardly shrugs – why
wouldn’t she? – after all, she’s getting paid to give the interview.

‘You can’t do this and have a
real partner.  No guy can take it.  The last relationship I had was
with a woman.’

So she’d said.

‘Why did you break up?’ 
Monique touches her hand.

‘She got jealous, or something
like that.’

‘Because you were seeing
clients?’

Like the mother of all déjà vu’s,
Adam hears the next sentence bounce around inside his skull for what feels like
an eternity before it seems Jasmin delivers it.

‘No – she’s an escort
too.  You can see her on ’365.  Xara.  We were fucking each
other silly for weeks on end.’

It’s all Adam can do to cling to
the bar-top, like a kid hanging on for grim death to a playground roundabout
over-spun by a stronger sibling.  Miraculously, it seems to him, Monique
has eyes only for the girl, her lips parted in wonderment.  Jasmin flashes
him a quick glance, but he detects no hidden meaning.

‘I was sleeping at her place
– but she wouldn’t give me a key.  She’s so controlling.  She
hated it if I did an outcall and never came back that night.  The thing
is, you never know how a job will go.  Sometimes a punter might decide he
wants you for an extra couple of hours, or an overnight – that’s good
money.  Sometimes you both pass out and next thing it’s nine in the
morning and the cleaners are tapping on the door.  Then when I’d rock up
she’d go crazy at me, threaten to throw me out, start beating me up.’  She
sniffs and absently wipes away a memory from the undersides of her nose with
her forefinger.’

‘Why didn’t you just move out?’

‘I suppose… half the time it was
okay.  Even when she’d go off on one, and we’d end up fighting, wrestling…
the next thing we’re screwing with strap-ons and doing mental stuff… and it was
back to normal.  And it was a good base when I came home from Spain. 
She’s got this huge apartment, more like being in a hotel, on two floors with
separate entrances – you can work there and live there and keep the two
things apart.  She owns loads of real estate – abroad, so they
say.  She makes out she’s twenty-eight, and maybe she looks it, but she’s
more like thirty-eight.  One of the other girls told me she’s been on the
game for twenty years.  Imagine that, for someone who’s got a problem with
men.’

‘So many men!’  Monique
can’t help sounding a little awed, while Adam hasn’t got the spare wit to
respond.  He tries to stand upright, thinking he’ll escape to the toilet,
but he’s badly unbalanced by the revelation and the alcohol.  He slips off
the swivel-stool and staggers back against a cupboard.  The two girls look
his way expectantly, and both straighten in their seats, as though they’ve been
waiting for such a signal.  Maybe Jasmin’s graphic references have
reminded them why they are together tonight.  Suddenly the right words
come to him:

‘Maybe it’s time for another one,
then?’

The suggestion is enough. 
The girls offer rueful smiles, as if, on emerging from a fashion-store changing
room, they’ve remembered that their male chaperone has been patiently twiddling
his thumbs for the past half-hour.  Jasmin reaches down for her bag. 
Then Monique draws her by the arm and says:

 ‘Come and see… we’ll peek
at Camille.’

Adam wants to object – it’s
a level of intimacy that doesn’t feel right.  This girl’s a paid hand not
a family friend; he doesn’t want her cooing over his daughter.  Monique is
granting her a level of access into their life that he could never entertain
– but as a means of escaping the topic of Xara… he acquiesces.  He
says:

‘I’ll bring fresh drinks.’

The girls clip-clop out into the
hall.  He listens as they inelegantly scale the stairs.  Their liquid
voices, shaken and stirred with tipsy giggles, fade to silence as they enter
Camille’s bedroom.  He takes his time, temporarily deserting his post as
waiter and instead opening one of the doors leading out onto the veranda. 
He inhales the cool night air like a smoker overdue his next cigarette.

His thoughts are jumping about
like a disoriented bat in the darkness, its senses overloaded with rogue
signals.  He’s seconds from a threesome, and Monique’s really up for
it.  But the shock of the near-miss has gazumped his excitement.  Was
Jasmin really unaware of the whites of his eyes, the impending head-on
collision as she careered towards him, carelessly conversing with her passenger
Monique?

There’s the bizarre possibility
that he and Xara and Jasmin have overlapped.   What are the
implications of that?  Or what if Jasmin is just making it up as she goes
along?  On the phone yesterday she couldn’t even remember who he and
Monique were.  Why should he rely on her fantastic account of sugar
daddies, money, properties and a surely improbable lesbian affair with a fellow
prostitute?  She might easily know Xara, and hear things about her on the
call girls’ grapevine – but the impenetrable world they inhabit prevents
outsiders like him from challenging her claims.  Then again, is he an
outsider?  He could phone Xara right now.

He could, but he won’t.  He
has to get Jasmin out of his life – their lives – but to win on
that front, careful diplomacy is required this evening.  Not only is she a
ticking time-bomb, she has an alien quality he can’t quite fathom, rendering
her doubly hard to handle.  So far she has painted a confused portrait of
herself: the pathetic and the spirited, the indifferent and the seducer.

But Monique shares none of his
fears – she’s at once entranced and at ease.  Where he sees a
minefield, she blithely glides ahead.  He tells himself he should do
likewise.  It’s one night only and the danger will surely pass.  He
returns to the kitchen and assembles a fresh bottle of champagne and a tinkling
trio of clean glasses upon a tray.

The scenario he’d discussed with
Monique was that they’d show the girl into one of their guest rooms.  She
could prepare as she wished, then join them in the massage that they would by
then have commenced.  This seemed a good way to break the ice.  Now
Adam wonders if Monique has despatched Jasmin according to their initial
plan.  Their broad landing is empty and Camille’s door – normally
left ajar – is closed.  He backs into the master bedroom, carefully
balancing his cargo, to be enveloped by the heavy pulse of a base beat. 
It’s dark; there’s just the pale flicker of a candle on Monique’s
dresser.  Beside it a bottle of oil lies on its side, dripping
rhythmically onto the carpet.  Behind him, reflected in the arrangement of
angled mirrors, a kaleidoscopic tangle of naked limbs writhes in the scented
gloom.  Spellbound, Adam carefully deposits his cargo and, still watching
through the looking glass, slowly unbuttons his shirt.

***

Showering, in the still eye of
the storm, Adam flushes oily debris from his body.  They’d turned to him only
after their private tryst and its twinned oblivion, but it had still felt
good.  How different, he thinks, Monique’s tightness to Jasmin’s…
so
many men
.  And he’d been discomfited when, despite her apparent
abandon to them both, he’d felt her hard lacquered nails check for a
condom.  He’s glad it’s over.  He dries, deodorises, half-dresses and
slopes downstairs in search of the two girls, draining what drops of champagne
survive in the bottle salvaged from the floor.

The kitchen is empty, but the
French doors are open and he hears low voices.  He leans into the darkness
and for a few seconds only a tiny orange firefly betrays their presence. 
Then his eyes begin to adjust and he sees them, like schoolgirls skulking in a
bus-shelter, huddled together sharing a cigarette.  To the best of his
knowledge Monique has never been a smoker, but now the firefly travels to her
lips and burns brightly, then she holds it out to him, exhaling slowly before
she speaks.

‘Here, my darling – take
it.’

Jasmin’s allotted two hours must
almost be over, yet he notices neither of the two are dressed: they are wrapped
in his and Monique’s matching towelling gowns, pulled close against the
chill.  He plays for time – though barefoot and topless his shivers
are genuine – and says:

‘Wait – I’ll a get a
sweat-top.  Aren’t you guys frozen?’

Their response is merely to
giggle and snuggle closer together.  Monique now presses the cigarette to
Jasmin’s lips.

Adam turns indoors and seeks out
the ironing basket in the utility room, where he sifts for something he might
recognise.  As he encounters Monique’s underwear he thinks how she
surrendered unashamedly to her desires, directed from deep inside, oblivious to
his presence.  Their furious climax went un-faked.  They have bonded.
Now he wants Jasmin to leave.